Charles Bukowski was a Mac

Here’s something I found interesting as both a writer and a geek. It comes to us from that curator of the awesomest awesome-sauce on the Web, Jason Kottke.

Basically, the deal is that Charles Bukowski (who I’ll admit I know very little about, other than the fact that a Peanuts strip by him would be hilarious) became a Mac user in his old age. At roundabout 70 years old, his wife bought him a Macintosh IIsi, and he apparently loved the thing. “There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite,” he wrote. “I know a computer can’t make a writer but I think it makes a writer better.”

And, apparently, his love of technology didn’t end there.

In a letter to John Martin, his Black Sparrow publisher, Bukowski mentioned the availability of a technology (the Internet) that would allow him to send poems instantly. The speed and ease of new technologies amazed, excited, and inspired him. When he first got a fax machine, Bukowski immediately wrote Martin a fax poem… Bukowski’s open-mindedness in old age is refreshing, when you consider all the aging writers who fall back and rely on the familiar, be it in technologies of writing or actual writing style.